From miniature melting pot to global marketplace
Ben Gomes-Casseres ’76
Professor of International Business, IBSM.P.A, Princeton University
D.B.A., Harvard University
The Caribbean island of Curaçao may be small, but, for Ben Gomes-Casseres, growing up there meant exposure to a wide cultural mix. He describes it as “a Dutch island with a Spanish-Portuguese culture and an American media influence,” and he believes that being a part of that melting pot when he was young helped him develop the flexibility he needed to succeed in today’s global marketplace.
After graduating from Brandeis and then Princeton, Gomes-Casseres went on to work as an analyst for the World Bank, a job that required lots of international travel.
“Business today is about crossing borders and cultures,” he says. “In a way, I’ve been doing that my whole life. I hope to help my students learn to do that, too. By understanding other cultures, politics, and economics better, our students can make an impact in the business world.”
Learning history through cinema
Alice Kelikian
Associate Professor of HistoryD.Phil., Oxford University
The gifted and energetic daughter of a noted Armenian-American orthopedic surgeon, Alice Kelikian was once on the fast track to an elite science education. But seeing “The Organizer,” Mario Monicelli’s 1963 film about an Italian labor strike, refocused her attention on Italian cinema and the political culture it illuminated.
Shunning the science lab, she became a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton, where she explored Italian Marxism, history and politics.
On the Brandeis faculty since 1981, Kelikian has tapped her passion for directors like Fellini, Pasolini and Visconti to inform her popular course Italian Films, Italian Histories. A magnet for campus film buffs, she assumed leadership of Brandeis’s film minor in 2006.
Since then, she has used her trademark assertiveness and entrepreneurial character to energize the campus film community, more than quadrupling the number of film minors as she expanded world-cinema and film-production course offerings and brought A-list motion picture artists to speak.
In 2008, she persuaded Brandeis to establish film and visual media studies as a new major.
Chemist with a Message
Greg Petsko
Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacodynamics and of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research CenterOxford University, D. Phil.
Greg Petsko describes himself as the poor man’s Al Gore of age-related neurologic disease.The leading biochemist’s message about the coming epidemic of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is apocalyptic, yet based on the latest scientific evidence.
A member of the National Academy of Science who regularly includes undergraduates in his research, he describes the inconvenient — and alarming — truth this way: “Life is a Ponzi scheme. For thousands of years, we’ve depended on a large base of young people to support a small pyramid tip of very old people. But the percentage of elderly is increasing much faster than that of the young, threatening to bring the entire pyramid down because we face an epidemic of age-related neurologic disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Only a concerted effort to find cures and preventative treatments for these diseases can save mankind from an economic and public health crisis of global proportions.”
The solution? Working at what amounts to warp speed in science, Petsko and his collaborator, biochemist Dagmar Ringe, the Harold and Bernice Davis Professor of Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease and of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Science Research Center, have devised a unique research program in collaboration with Harvard Medical School to accelerate drug discovery to treat or prevent these diseases.